23-05-2014, 02:51 AM
(22-05-2014, 07:22 AM)20000 Hz Under The Sea Wrote: While we all want our mixes loud as hell . . .
Not all of us...
Myself? I'm becoming quite infamous around here for my crusade against dynamic range compression in mastering, something I absolutely refuse to do; in my work, compressors are something to be used in the mix only, and then only gently and only on the tracks that need it. The only treatment I do to my mixes to make them "loud" is to normalize them so the loudest peak hits 0 dBFS without clipping; that way they're as loud as I can get them without sacrificing clarity and dynamics.
This is a personal artistic choice and, for my work, I don't intend to back off from that position. I concede, however, that some engineers here, such as juanjose1967, actually have a gift for making compression and limiting completely transparent, amping up the volume without sacrificing clarity. I like juan's sound, which is extremely rare for me as I generally abhor compression in mastering (I love Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell III but I'd love to get my hands on his multitracks so I can recreate the mixes without the master compression that squeezes quite a bit of a life out of them IMHO). So I am willing to concede that it can be done transparently, but even so I have yet to meet the mix that didn't sound better without that master compression bypassed.
So, as far as my recordings are concerned? You want "loud?" That's what that little knob/button/touchscreen option on your music device marked "volume" is for...
Actually, I recently heard some news that might finally spell the death knoll for this "make it loud" madness:
Apple has mandated that all iTunes Radio stations use Sound Check. Most people here probably know exactly what that is but, in brief, Sound Check automatically analyzes the overall volume of each song and aligns them so that they're all about the same volume; that way there are no wild swings in volume from one song to the next.
This "loudness war" insanity started, for the most part, because artists wanted their songs louder than their competitors' in the hope that their song would draw attention on the radio because it's louder than all the others. Well, with iTunes Radio, if you do manage to make your song louder than the others, iTunes will just turn it down to the level of the others, anyway. Dynamically compressed material, when level-matched with dynamic material, always ends up sounding washed out and wimpy because the brief transients that create that clarity and "sparkle" like the snap of drums, the pluck of a guitar string etc. get squashed out with compression. So the dynamic recording, played on an even volume playing field with the compressed one, has the decided advantage.
Apple does tend to set trends; I'm hoping this development will discourage, and eventually eliminate entirely, this obsession with making recordings "loud" that has slowly ruined the sound quality of CDs from the late 1990s on.